Maya Civilization

The Maya civilization was a Native American culture that built cities and kingdoms in Central America. Maya people lived in what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador. The civilization began more than 3,000 years ago. Its biggest cities were built between the years 250 and 900. Millions of Maya people still live in the same region today and speak Maya languages.

The Maya did not have one single emperor. Instead, they lived in dozens of separate city-states. Each city had its own king, its own gods, and its own army. Famous Maya cities include Tikal, Palenque, Copán, and Chichén Itzá. Some of these cities held more than 50,000 people, which was bigger than most European cities at the same time.

Maya cities were filled with stone temples, palaces, and pyramids. The pyramids had stairs leading up to a small temple at the top. Priests climbed the stairs to perform ceremonies. The Temple of Kukulcán at Chichén Itzá is built so that on the spring and fall equinox, a shadow shaped like a snake slithers down its stairs.

The Maya were also brilliant scientists. They studied the sky for hundreds of years and built one of the most accurate calendars in the ancient world. They tracked the movements of Venus so closely that their predictions were off by only a few minutes per year. They developed a writing system with more than 800 picture symbols called glyphs, carved onto stone walls and painted in folding books made of bark paper.

Around the year 900, something strange happened. Many of the great southern Maya cities were abandoned. The people left their pyramids and palaces, and the jungle slowly grew over them. Scientists still argue about why. Some think long droughts ruined the farming. Others point to wars between cities, or to too many people using up the soil. Most likely, several of these problems happened at the same time.

The Maya themselves did not disappear. They moved, rebuilt smaller communities, and kept their languages and traditions alive. When Spanish soldiers arrived in the 1500s, they conquered the remaining Maya kingdoms and burned almost all the bark-paper books. Only four of those books survived.

For centuries, no one could read Maya writing. Then, starting in the 1950s, scholars slowly cracked the code. The carvings turned out to be real history, with the names of kings, the dates of battles, and the stories of royal families. Today about six million people speak Maya languages, and archaeologists are still finding lost cities hidden under the jungle using lasers mounted on airplanes.